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Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Barry Commoner

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Hazards Independent
Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Ecosystems Environmental
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Fads Lasts
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

Apprentice Modern Technology
The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
BARRY COMMONER

Day Earth Environmental Use
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
BARRY COMMONER

Inheritance Law Technology
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONER

Age May Technology
The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.
BARRY COMMONER

Facts Vision War
Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Entering Environmental Quality Simple
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Day Earth Firefighter People
Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Natural Pay
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.—->I dont believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
BARRY COMMONER

Believe Environmentalism Law Together
Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.
BARRY COMMONER

Difficult Growing Simple Triumph
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Risk Running
The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
BARRY COMMONER

Air Epa Method Progress
As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.
BARRY COMMONER

Doctors Teacher Views
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
BARRY COMMONER

Army Command Scientist
If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.
BARRY COMMONER

Agriculture Answers Energy
The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
BARRY COMMONER

Gaps Needs Technology
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER

Irrational Reason Shirts
No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Effect Sides
What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point – the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Need Powerful
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
BARRY COMMONER

Advice Die Information
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONER

Approach Impossible Zero
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER

Impact Technology War
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
BARRY COMMONER

Earth Day Environmental Survival

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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Popular Authors

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